


Place Your Bets

by KayQy



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-26
Updated: 2013-02-26
Packaged: 2017-12-03 16:05:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/700084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KayQy/pseuds/KayQy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark never knew it, but Yinsen was something of a gambler.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Place Your Bets

Tony Stark never knew it, but Yinsen was something of a gambler.

Once he'd installed the magnet in Stark's chest and hooked it up to the battery, before he'd even washed the blood from his hands, Yinsen sat near the cot, waiting for him to regain consciousness, and considered the man.

Actually, he considered two men: Tony Stark and himself.

Considering himself didn't take very long. He'd done it often enough before, and liked to think he knew himself rather well. And frankly, there wasn't much left of him to consider. He'd been held by the Ten Rings for far too long now. Been forced to dirty his hands for them too often, in ways both large and small. He couldn't even take much comfort in the few lives he was able to save, since usually, as with Stark, those lives were spared only long enough to engender more death and destruction. Yinsen had lost his family, he'd lost his pride, and if he hadn't already lost any chance of redemption, he'd certainly no chance of it ever being _enough_.

Then there was Tony Stark. The man was famous and infamous: the genius, the billionaire, the playboy, the inventor, the Merchant of Death. If you believed a fraction of what the headlines said, that was all he was. A heartless rich boy who cared for nothing but his own pleasure and success, who happened to have the brains to back up his ego.

Yinsen cast his mind back to the memory of a scientific symposium in a different lifetime, to a heretofore inconsequential meeting. Tony Stark had pissed off most of the attendees before the conference insulting either their personal life or their science, and gained half of their forgiveness by buying the entire symposium drinks afterwards, but when he had spoken about the science itself, he had been focused, and clear, and clearly brilliant. Yinsen had shaken his hand and given him some easily forgettable compliment later, and the young man had already been drunk. But with the wisdom of his current dreadful experience, Yinsen knew that the calluses and scars on Tony Stark's hands had been from workshops, not warzones. And the emptiness in his eyes at that symposium had not been the soulless emptiness of a killer (a look he was far too familiar with now), but the much more common emptiness of a person wearing a mask to hide his loneliness. Despite his worldly sophistication, in many ways still a boy, not yet made aware of how his actions affected others. Of what buzzwords like "weapons of mass destruction" actually meant, when one was on the other side of the targeting program.

Yinsen looked down at his own hands, sitting perversely still in his lap, unshaken by the blood (literal and metaphorical) that stained them. _He will not remain so naive for much longer._ And then, awakened to the reality of his actions, Stark would either become a monster in truth, or....

_Or he will die that much sooner, let's be realistic here._

But there was always that tiny, fantastically impossible chance that Stark would survive. That he would escape this cave, be rescued. Fight back. Win. And then have to live with what he's done. What would he do then, once his eyes were opened? Would he close them again, abandon the victims he didn't yet know existed, try to pretend that nothing had changed? Would he embrace the monster within him, become even worse than the ones that created him?

Or would he look at the world with newly-opened eyes, like he once looked at a conference full of stagnant scientists, reject the way things were, and shake the world into something more?

Tony Stark had the potential to change the world, the power to make up for the damage in his past, in a way that Yinsen never could, if only.

If only this week could become a catalyst for something other than more destruction.

Yinsen had a choice. He could give up now. Encourage Stark to submit to the inevitable when he woke up, to behave and keep his head bowed, and maybe they'd both live a little longer. Not that such a life would be worth much of anything.

Or he could bottle away his despair, and try to be the catalyst Stark needed. Push him to open his eyes, see the true legacy of his family, his company, his genius. Then convince him that his legacy needed to be more than just death. That it-- that _he_ could be something better.

Yinsen did not have the power to save the world, or to redeem all the blood on his hands. But maybe, just maybe, he could be the catalyst for someone who did.

Yinsen stood up, washed his hands of what blood he could, picked up his razor. Another man would have been shaking with the audacity of what he was considering. But his hands were steady as he scraped the stubble off his face. He already knew where he was going to place his bet.

It was possible he was wrong about the man, that he wouldn't change, that he wouldn't care. It was almost guaranteed that they would both die here, before there was a chance to change anything.

But Yinsen was a gambling man. And if it meant he could face his family when he finally went to see them, any mad risk was worth taking.


End file.
